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2025 Mini-Grad Recipients

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2025 Mini-Grad Grants Recipients 

Ali Karakaya

Ali Karakaya is a first-year Ph.D. student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. His research centers on women’s literature and the representation of marginalized groups from Eastern Europe analyzed through feminist and post-colonial theoretical frameworks, with a particular focus on queer narratives from the region. He works with Ukrainian, Russian, and Crimean Tatar languages and literatures, and translates both literary and theoretical works. Ali recently published a translation of a poem by Crimean Tatar poet Mayya Safet. He was part of the inaugural cohort of the Translating Ukraine Institute and has published on contemporary Ukrainian literature in various academic journals. He is currently working on translating an anthology of queer Ukrainian literature into English.

What do you hope to do with the grant? I hope to translate and publish a cycle of Crimean Tatar poems—primarily written by women—spanning various periods in Crimean Tatar history (Khanate, Tsarist Russia, struggles for independence, invasion, pre-deportation, deportation, and post-deportation). This project commemorates the 81st anniversary of the Deportation of Crimean Tatars from their homeland in May. I plan to use the grant funds for professional editing services and journal submission fees. This project excites me because it will increase the limited presence of Crimean Tatar poetry in English offering readers an opportunity to explore the history and cultural heritage of the Crimean Tatar people through poetry. I hope it will foster a deeper appreciation of their unique identity outside the Russian imperial framework. This project will also help build a corpus of texts in English that I can use for my research, which focuses on marginalized identities in Eastern Europe.


Emre Can Daglioglu

Emre Can Daglioglu is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the political economy of the 19th- and 20th-century Middle East. His research centers on the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), an international financial institution established by European powers in 1881 to manage the Ottoman Empire's defaulted foreign debt. His dissertation examines the financial, political, local, and environmental dimensions of silk production and commodification, exploring how the OPDA transformed capitalism, the socio-ecological landscape, and governance within the empire from 1881 until the outbreak of World War I.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Emre received his master's degree from the University of Exeter and completed a graduate program at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. In addition to publishing articles and book chapters on marginalized groups in Turkey and socialism in the mid-20th century Middle East, he edited the book Arapların 1915'i: Soykırım, Kimlik, Coğrafya (in Turkish) [Arabs' 1915: Genocide, Identity, Geography], published by İletişim Yayınları in 2021. He is also the co-editor of Nehna, an online platform dedicated to Arab Christians in Turkey and cultural diversity in Antioch and its surroundings.

What do you hope to do with the grant? With the Markaz mini-grant, I plan to visit the Special Collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills, to examine the private papers of Donald Blaisdell, the only historian who likely had access to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration's (OPDA) institutional archives before their destruction in the 1940s. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for me, as Blaisdell's papers hold the potential to uncover rare insights into the operations and impact of this pivotal institution. By engaging with these materials, I aim to deepen and refine my research on how the OPDA shaped the economic and political foundations of the modern Middle East. This grant will allow me to piece together a more comprehensive understanding of a critical historical actor whose legacy continues to influence global financial systems today.


Naseef Parasseri

Naseef Parasseri is a Dean’s Fellow PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at StanfordUniversity, with a minor in Cultural Anthropology. His research explores the anthropology of night(ly) experiences, with a particular focus on colonial South Indian Muslim contexts, examining how night serves as a transformative space mediating materiality, the state, suffering, emotions, and more. He is also interested in communitarian notions of the secular, the intersection of religion and business families in Southern India, and the broader relationship between Islam and secular(ity). Naseef earned his Master’s degree in Society and Culture from IIT Gandhinagar, specializing in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. 

What do you hope to do with the grant? My research seeks to define what an anthropology of night among Muslims might look like, with a particular focus on the nightscapes of Mappila Muslims—a South Asian Sunni Muslim community. Using a historical and anthropological approach, my study examines how night serves as a transformative asecular space, mediating Mappila Muslims’ experiences of materiality, the state, suffering, uncertainty, and pain. By treating night as both an ethnographic field and an object of study, I explore how Mappilas have culturally and historically shaped their nights—and how, in turn, these nights have shaped them.  During the grant period, I plan to advance my primary research, focusing on the ways in which night constitutes Muslims and, conversely, how Muslims constitute their nights. A key part of this project involves an analysis of classical Islamic texts such as the Qur’an and Hadith, to investigate how concepts of sacredness and scaredness emerge from the same source and how this interplay connects and disconnects people from origins, intermediary realms such as dreams and death, and otherworldly dimensions.


Rabia Kutlu Karasu

Rabia Kutlu Karasu is a 3rd-year PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Her research explores legislative politics and political behavior in contexts of democratic backsliding, with a particular focus on elite behavior and representation. She employs quantitative and computational methods to uncover dynamics within transitional regimes.

What do you hope to do with the grant? With the Markaz Mini-Grant, I aim to advance my research on gender dynamics in political representation, particularly focusing on how systemic biases shape opportunities for women in leadership. This grant is especially exciting as it provides crucial resources to enhance my analysis through data collection and fieldwork, enabling a deeper understanding of gendered differences in representation and political participation and amplifying the impact of my work.


Shandana Waheed

Shandana Waheed is a PhD dissertation writer at Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology and Stanford Archaeology Center. Her research stands at the intersection of anthropology, archaeology and urban studies, and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in South Asia exploring relationship between material heritage, difficult histories, local populations, and Islamic state. My dissertation, tentatively titled “Present of the Past: Politics of Heritage in Post-colonial Rawalpindi” examines the management and operation of Rawalpindi’s pre-partition urban architectural heritage through bureaucratic institutions perpetuating the colonial legacies of governance to shed new light on the politicization of heritage through the lens of religion and nationalism in post-colonial state. 

What do you hope to do with the grant? With the support of Stanford Markaz, I will be curating a digital exhibition titled “Memories of the City” featuring post-partition Muslim immigrant life in the city of Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The exhibition will be hosted at Anthropology of South Asia (ASA) a digital platform about everything South Asia, told through the stories of anthropologists.